Cooling human bodies has long been a need in many circumstances. For instances, firemen, law enforcement personnel, military personnel, construction workers, petroleum industry workers, smelting plant workers and boiler operators generally work in often hot and humid environments. For these people, having a portable system for cooling their bodies is particularly useful and sometimes even necessary.
To address this need, several portable cooling systems have been proposed throughout the years. Prior art examples of portable cooling systems can be found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,964,282; 5,217,408; 5,564,124; 5,970,519; 6,257,011 and 6,260,201; and more recently in U.S. Patent Application Publication Nos. 2006/0026743; 2006/0174392 and 2007/0199124.
Still, the common thread among the prior art systems is that they generally all blow air toward the body. Though this approach does generally work, it has some shortcomings. For instance, the air blown toward the body can be equally hot and/or humid or even hotter and/or more humid than the air surrounding the body. Hence, despite ongoing development, there is still a need for a novel personal cooling system which mitigates the shortcomings of the prior art.